Read Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality Online
Authors: Wesley Hill
But I also have in mind others—parents, brothers and sisters, close relatives not in the immediate family, good friends, pastors, youth leaders, counselors—who are close to homosexual Christians and want to help guide them toward healing, wholeness, and Christian maturity. I hope that they, too, will read this book and benefit from reflecting on the experiences I describe.
And I hope there are others who will “overhear” what I write who struggle long and hard with persistent, unwanted desires or other afflictions that are similar in some ways to those of gay and lesbian Christians—chemical dependencies, eating disorders, mental and emotional disturbances of various kinds. If Christians in these and other related positions are able to adapt and appropriate some of what I say to fit their own situations, I will be happy. The Christian’s struggle with homosexuality is unique in many ways but not completely so. The dynamics of human sinfulness and divine mercy and grace are the same for all of us, regardless of the particular temptations or weaknesses we face.
In my experience, the effort to live faithfully as a gay Christian has involved me in three main battles. First has been the struggle
to understand what exactly the gospel demands of homosexual Christians; why it seems to require that I not act on my homosexual desires—and how the gospel enables me to actually fulfill this demand. Chapter 1 of this book, “A Story-Shaped Life,” is devoted to these questions.
Second, for me, being a Christian who experiences intense homoerotic desires has meant loneliness—feelings of isolation, fears that I will be alone all my life with my brokenness, that no one will be there for the long haul to walk this road with me. Most gay Christians who are convinced that gay sex isn’t an option will, I suspect, probably find celibacy to be the best or only alternative for living in a way that is faithful to the gospel’s call for purity. And because of that, most gay Christians will experience loneliness. So the question becomes: How do we live with this loneliness? Is there any relief for it? What comforts does the gospel offer? This is the focus of chapter 2, “The End of Loneliness.”
Finally, in my life and in the lives of many others, shame has been a constant struggle in the effort to live out the life of Christ and his Spirit in homosexual terms. Guilt over homosexual sin, a nagging, unshakable feeling of being “damaged goods,” a sense of being broken beyond repair—and therefore of being regularly, unavoidably displeasing to God—these all seem endemic to much homosexual Christian experience. In chapter 3, “The Divine Accolade,” I address this struggle and try to express the conviction that has become the heartbeat of my life—that we homosexual Christians, in the words of C. S. Lewis, can actually be “a real ingredient in the divine happiness.”
7
We can please God, can truly experience his pleasure in the midst of sexual brokenness, and in the end share in his glory.
Interspersed throughout these chapters are three mini-biographies or character sketches of homosexual Christians. The first is my own life story, and I have also included the stories of Henri Nouwen, the now-deceased gay Catholic writer on spirituality, and the nineteenth-century homoerotically inclined Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, in the hope that hearing about the travails and triumphs of three real-life homosexual Christians may help readers put hands and feet on the more theoretical material in the main chapters of the book.
It is my prayer that God may use the reflections in this book to help others live faithfully before him until the time when he makes all things new. Until then, we
wait
in hope (Romans 8:25),
washed
clean by his Son and Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:11).
Before moving on, I want to briefly describe the terminology used in the following pages. In this book I have chosen not to discriminate between various terms for homosexuality. So, for instance, I use “same-sex attraction,” “homosexual desires,” “homosexuality,” and related terms interchangeably. Likewise, I’ve used a variety of designations for gay and lesbian people. Instead of sticking to one term, such as “homosexual Christian,” I also refer to myself as a “gay Christian” or “a Christian who experiences homosexual desires.” These phrases are all synonymous for me, and though they are open to misunderstanding, in my judgment the gains in using them outweigh the potential hazards. None of them should be taken necessarily to imply homosexual practice; in each case I am most often placing the emphasis on the subject’s sexual orientation and not the corresponding behavior.
There is, however, one way of speaking that I’ve tried to avoid. Rather than refer to someone as “a homosexual,” I’ve taken care always to make “gay” or “homosexual” the adjective, and never the noun, in a longer phrase, such as “gay Christian” or “homosexual person.” In this way, I hope to send a subtle linguistic signal that being gay isn’t the most important thing about my or any other gay person’s identity. I am a
Christian
before I am anything else. My homosexuality is a part of my makeup, a facet of my personality. One day, I believe, whether in this life or in the resurrection, it will fade away. But my identity as a Christian—someone incorporated into Christ’s body by his Spirit—will remain.
You were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.
1 Corinthians 6:11
We ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies…If we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.
Romans 8:23, 25
P
UBERTY CAME LATE FOR ME
, or so it felt at the time. I was almost thirteen years old, but far from being the exciting whirlwind of change that it was for my friends, the experience terrified me. From the very beginning of those unsettling months, I found strange new desires—it wasn’t clear to me then that they were sexual—for the other guys my age who were going through the same turbulent transformation. I started noticing and being fascinated by the firming muscles and the growing hair of my male
friends. I would steal glances at them whenever I could, trying not to be caught but unsure why I felt it necessary to be so secretive.
I remember being at an airport once for a field trip my church group took to the air traffic control tower. At some point, several friends of mine slipped away from the hawkish gaze of our teachers and started exploring the airport’s souvenir shops and magazine racks. I jogged with them along one of the terminals, feeling rebellious and carefree, laughing. In one of the shops, they found
Playboy
magazines. They were in plain view on a shelf along the back wall, and one of my friends quickly opened one as the rest of us huddled around, ducking out of the salesclerk’s line of sight. In an instant I felt like an outsider. I wouldn’t have been able to express it at the time, but I realized something was different. I felt no rush, no thrill, no curiosity, no sense of the mysterious attraction that my friends all seemed to be relishing as they glanced nervously over their shoulders until the clerk saw us and angrily ordered us out of the shop.
In those tingly days of growing into a new kind of body, I wasn’t sure why I had images of other
guys,
other males, parading through my excited yet faintly discomfited mind. Maybe all this was part of the process of growing up and would go away eventually? I didn’t speculate too much about it all—I didn’t know enough to ask good questions. Mostly I tried to weather what felt like a strange but soon-to-pass storm that was part guilty pleasure, part confusing agony.
Around this time, my parents made the decision that we should stop attending the large Southern Baptist church where we were members. I had not yet entered the youth group at that church and really had no desire to. I felt mortified by the pimples
covering my temples, nose, and chin, and whenever I tried to talk to someone else my own age, I could feel my face turning a hot shade of red and my armpits sweating. I had spent my entire life up to that point in a sheltered Southern fundamentalism and would have preferred never to have a conversation with any peer if I could help it. My parents found a smaller, nondenominational church with a dozen kids in the youth group, most of whom I knew already and felt more at ease around, and we made the switch.
During the next three years, I grew out of much of the scared awkwardness of those first months of puberty. But changing churches and becoming less socially inept didn’t make one iota’s difference when it came to my sexuality. I still felt in my gut that something had gone wrong. Somehow genetic wires must have been crossed, and as a result there had been a glitch in my otherwise normal development.
As I left childhood behind and began to learn more about myself and the world I lived in, I came to realize that what had happened to my mind and body was drastically different from what had happened to my friends’. When I started meeting with a small group of guys at my church for prayer and accountability, lust was, predictably, one of the main topics of discussion. “We like to mentally undress girls we see—what should we do about that?” one of us maturely asked our twentysomething leader. “Come on, we’re all red-blooded American males here,” another one of the guys chimed in. “We can talk about our struggles openly.” I came to realize, with a mild sense of panic, that I
couldn’t
talk about
my
struggle openly—couldn’t identify with my friends as they discussed their frustrations with knowing how to handle their
hormones. My problem was never mentally undressing
girls.
As they talked, I planned how to keep my answers vague so that my difference would remain a secret.
My earliest childhood memories are of my mother reading colorful, rhyming Bible storybooks to me and helping me draw pictures with crayons of my favorite Bible characters. I understood at a very young age that Jesus had died on a cross, condemned by the Jewish high priests and the Roman government in Jerusalem, and that after lying three days in a tomb, he had risen from the dead. Growing up, I never doubted that this was, somehow, the most important news in the world and that it could be the center of people’s lives because I saw that it was the center of my parents’ lives. I prayed at a young age, in good evangelical fashion, to “ask Jesus into my heart.” I was baptized at age eleven.
By the time I reached the ninth grade or so, I had been fully persuaded that Jesus was and is God come in the flesh for me and for my salvation, and I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life loving and obeying him. Over time, my parents’ nurturing role was replaced by my own reading of the Bible. In a process filled with starts and stops, I learned to pray, to dialogue with God on my own, as I drove my car or lay in my bed at night. I read books on spirituality and doctrine by C. S. Lewis, Frederick Buechner, J. I. Packer, Henri Nouwen, and John Piper. Self-motivated now, I started wrestling with the perennial problems of Christian discipleship. I looked for answers in the Bible and asked my youth pastor lots of questions over barbecue sandwiches and Cokes at a local greasy spoon.
Birdlike, I was testing my wings, coming of age. But at the same time that I was learning to engage with God as a hungry,
growing young Christian, the realization dawned on me like a dead weight sinking in my stomach that no amount of spiritual growth seemed to have any effect on my sexual preference. The homoerotic attractions I had been conscious of since waking up to the strange new universe of sexuality remained so constant and unbroken that I came to realize I was experiencing what was usually called “homosexuality.” I had a homosexual orientation. I was gay.
For me, admitting this to myself—I have memories of lying in bed, staring at the ceiling in the dark, mulling it over, forming the word
homosexual
silently on my lips—was like an awareness that steals up on you one day out of the blue. It was there all along, but you saw it just then. There was nothing, it felt,
chosen
or
intentional
about my being gay. It seemed more like noticing the blueness of my eyes than deciding I would take up skiing. There was never an option—“Do you want to be gay?” “Yes, I do, please.” It was a gradual coming to terms, not a conscious resolution.
I remember listening to James Dobson’s
Focus on the Family
radio broadcast occasionally with my mother as we rode somewhere in the car together. My ears would perk up when the subject of homosexuality came up, which it did often, since this was the mid-1990s, and the “gay rights” movement was gaining steam. Dobson talked a lot about the “causes” of homosexuality—childhood sexual abuse, an emotionally distant father, the absence of affectionate male role models. I remember scrutinizing my past and present experiences. Did I fit these categories? I had never been sexually abused by anyone, let alone my parents. Was I close enough to my dad? I
could
think of one time I tried to initiate a
weekly time for just the two of us to be together, but it flopped. Plus, I never learned to play golf with him, nor did I want to take up deer hunting, as he seemed to hope I would. Did that mean I was suffering from a lack of paternal intimacy? I wracked my brain for answers, testing every possible explanatory avenue to understand how I came to have the homoerotic feelings that blazed like a fire in my head every day.
From time to time, not often, I would experiment with different strategies for awakening heterosexual desire. The lingerie section of the catalogs my mom received in the mail never did anything for me. The curves of women’s bodies on TV or movie screens flickered past my gaze with so little attraction that most of the time I didn’t give them a second thought.
One afternoon during my high school years, sitting on my bed in my room with the door closed, I was reading Elie Wiesel’s novel
Dawn
and came to a passage where Wiesel described two characters about to have sex. The girl was dressed in a blouse with no bra, and the man kissing her could see her breasts. I reread the passage several times, my face flushed with shame, trying to force some awakening of desire. I felt a faint stirring of excitement that, at the time, seemed unprecedented and earth-shattering. I stumbled off my bed, trembling slightly. I think that was the only time I have ever experienced sexual desire for a woman’s body, and it was so slight that, looking back, I sometimes wonder if maybe it was only a dream.
All through high school I never once even considered the possibility of pursuing a full-fledged homosexual relationship. I didn’t know any other gay people, and besides that, I was too steeped in the conservative, fundamentalist Christian world of the
Bible Belt to consider a gay partnership to be a live option. All I had heard about homosexuality up to that point was that it was a sin, that God never made anyone homosexual, and that he wanted those who were homosexual to follow some regimen of “reparative therapy” so that they could become decisively heterosexual.
I told no one about my homosexual feelings, not even my family, whom I was unusually close to in many ways. My strategy for coping with my condition was ignoring it, turning a blind eye to it, stuffing it deep into dark recesses of my consciousness and hoping that eventually it would be so deeply buried it would die for lack of exposure.
The fall of my senior year of high school, I began the process of applying to colleges. I got accepted to Wheaton College, a Christian liberal arts school near Chicago, and decided to go. As the time drew near to start college, I wondered what role my homosexuality would play in the experience. Would I meet a girl, as many people did at college, and would this miraculously alter my orientation? Mostly I strategized about how to keep my homosexuality under wraps. Imaginatively playing out different scenarios that could happen in the dorm, with roommates, in the community showers, and on the sports fields, I felt reasonably sure I could avoid being found out if I were careful.
My time at Wheaton turned out to be more fun and fruitful and stretching and horizon expanding than I could have guessed. I grew personally, spiritually, and academically by leaps and bounds. I was happily stunned by the feeling of being a fish that has finally plopped into its home pool after flapping in the air, gills gulping for it doesn’t know what.
One of the first classes I took my freshman year was on Christianity and culture, and for the final assignment, I chose to write a paper on a Christian view of homosexuality. I felt vaguely nervous doing so. Would people guess at my reason for choosing this topic and grow suspicious?
Writing this paper gave me the excuse I had been looking for to read a little of what theologians, philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, and psychiatrists were saying about homosexuality. For the first time, I read about the possible genetic origins of homosexuality. The dialectic of “nature and nurture,” the debate over “essentialism” versus “constructivism,” and the figures of the Kinsey report opened up new vistas of unexplored questions about my own experiences with homoerotic attraction. I discovered that there were serious, thoughtful, godly, and grace-filled Christians who thought, in many cases, that whatever degree of “construction” and “nurture” had conspired with genetic or chemical or hormonal hardwiring to produce a homosexual orientation, such an orientation was almost impossible to change.
But in my reading I also discovered that by far the majority of Christians—on the basis of their reading of several key passages from the Bible, together with the weight of Christian tradition, Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant—agreed that homosexual
practice
was sinful. Having gay sex was off-limits. Christians talked regularly, I found, of God’s original intention for creation and that, indeed, God, strictly speaking, didn’t
make
anyone homosexual. Rather, homosexuality was one of myriad tragic consequences of living in a fallen world stalked by the specters of sin and death.
As I read and thought about homosexuality throughout my four years of college, I felt that the things I had learned in writing
my initial paper—as amateur as it was—were confirmed. Somehow, in some way, I would have to be faithful to this Christian conviction—that homosexual lust, fantasies, and practice, whether self-stimulated or in partnership with another person, gay or straight, were not God’s will for my life. The question for me became, then: Could I change and become heterosexual? I had, of course, wondered this before. But instead of trying to keep my homosexual feelings under wraps, maybe now was the time to try in earnest, with concerted effort, to invert them.
In remembrance resides the secret of redemption.
Baal Shem Tov, founder of Hasidism
Slowly, almost imperceptibly, during college my homosexual orientation started to become more central to my self-understanding. I remember once being in the basement bathroom of my sophomore dorm and seeing scrawled in tiny script on the inside of one of the toilet stalls: “Gay at Wheaton—you are not alone” with an email address underneath it. I felt my throat tighten and sensed simultaneously an affinity with and aversion to the nameless writer. I wasn’t like him, I told myself, and yet I
was
like him. We were somehow related, companions on the same path.